Spreadsheets are ubiquitous. They are used by individuals as well as the largest organizations. Spreadsheets, originally designed as personal productivity tools, have become the application of choice for a wide variety of enterprise, department and team processes. Spreadsheets are used throughout enterprises, both large and small, for mission critical forecasting, budgeting, reporting, analysis, etc. They are easy to create, easy to modify and easy to use, however there are possible problems.
For example, consider this scenario: A budget administrator is burdened with bringing together diverse inputs and models from all over the enterprise. Getting the relevant operational data from spreadsheets from manufacturing, sales and marketing into the plan along with expense information from all of the cost center managers is an overwhelming task. Add to this the possibility that the capital plan and the compensation plan may both cross all these functions. This may result in budget administrators spending excessive hours completing this task, fraught with possible errors, and not having enough time for analysis. This presents a problem.
The natural temptation is to blame the spreadsheets for creating this situation; however, the alternative is generally replacing spreadsheets with a pre-packaged application lacking the ability of the spreadsheets in modeling your business. Furthermore, your models, processes and expertise may be built around spreadsheets. The bottom-line is that the loss of visibility, the cost of re-engineering business rules and processes, and re-training people is expensive. This presents a problem.
Spreadsheets, for example, Microsoft Excel were designed for personal productivity and this may lead to problems when being used by workgroups. It may be easy to merge, for example, a sales forecast when a spreadsheet is used by three sales managers. However, when as few as 5 users try to consolidate their information, it can be both cumbersome and trouble-prone. For example, one approach involves emailing spreadsheet workbooks to individuals, then having those workbooks filled out and emailed back, which necessitates manually replacing the original worksheets. Because these operations involve file management, email-based communication, repetitive manual reporting, analysis, and reconciliation, it may be difficult and time-consuming for a process administrator to keep track of who has what version of a file, and to ensure that all changes have been correctly merged. This presents a problem.
Another complaint leveled against the corporate use of spreadsheets is the proliferation of “spreadmarts,” (spreadsheet+datamart), that is many individual spreadsheets that contain different snapshots of corporate data. The problem is that while one person's snapshot may be of, for example, the January forecast, another's may be the January budget plus actuals to date. When people try to do analysis based on different snapshots, they have a problem.
When spreadsheet processes become enterprise processes, the administrative burden may become untenable with costs, inaccuracy, and inefficiencies escalating. The integrity of the processes may be at stake. This presents a problem.
Additionally, traditional spreadsheets are not web enabled, which is a benefit in today's connected world. This presents a problem.